Just finished Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody
The primary difference between the Web and the real world is ubiquity.
The real world is characterized by scarcity. There are only so many iPods. If I destroy one, there’s one less iPod in the world.
The Web is characterized by ubiquity. There is no limit to the number of downloads of U2′s new album. If I download it and delete it, there are, for all intents and purposes, no fewer in existence.
The reason it’s so easy to think about economic models in the real world is that we’re used to models based on scarcity. The rarer it is and the more that you want it, the more I can charge for it. Most of the things that are available on the Web are available in abundance (or, effectively, infinite-ness). This makes it very difficult to apply real-world economic models. So, as I said at a recent lecture I gave…
The financial challenge of the Web is to figure out how to monetize ubiquity.
I’ll let Chris tell you how he thinks it will happen (and let Gladwell rebut him quite succinctly), but of the ideas he presents, I’m going to put my money on information.
The example he gives of GOOG-411 suggests that it’s worth Google’s investment to give away the service for free if that means they can record how you order a pizza. In theory, the fact that you asked for “Domino’s” insted of “pizza” is of great value to marketers. If this is true, I think that kind of aggregated information will be the most valuable commodity of the new economy.
My strongest suspicion, though, is that it’s still way too damn early to tell.
What do you think?
[...] So, explaned Shirky in what became the mantra of the talk, “Abundance breaks more things than scarcity,” which is a sentiment I first started thinking about in the middle of reading Here Comes Everybody, when it occured to me that the laws of economics have not changed with the dawn of the Interwebs. Money is still money and business is still business. What’s changed is the environment. Many products that used to be scarce (mostly content) are now abundant. We know how to make money off of scarcity. We’re still figuring out how to monetize ubiquity (more on that). [...]